Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded for Research on How Cells Manage Oxygen was reported by Gina Kolata and Megan Specia for The New York Times Health Section, 7 October 2019. The prize was awarded to William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for discoveries about how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.

Why is this important to us? Beta cell need oxygen after transplantation … and that has been a major stumbling block … vascularization which brings blood (nutrients) to keep the cells alive.

Their work established the genetic mechanisms that allow cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. The findings have implications for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, anemia, heart attacks and strokes.

“Oxygen is the lifeblood of living organisms,” said Dr. George Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School. “Without oxygen, cells can’t survive.” But too much or too little oxygen also can be deadly. The three researchers tried to answer this question: How do cells regulate their responses?

(Dr. Semenza has received funding from NIH since 1988, totaling more than $20.3 million, primarily from NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.)

Rethinking Insulin is what Diasome Pharmaceuticals is all about. Since insulin’s discovery, developers and engineers have primarily focused on mastering two components of insulin treatment—but novel insulin development has not yet solved a critically important factor in optimizing insulin therapy: Location.

Diasome Pharmaceuticals is developing nanotechnology known as HDV (short for Hepatocyte Directed Vesicles), that would be injected as an insulin add-on or swallowed as a pill. It would attach to insulin, causing the medication to be better absorbed into the liver’s metabolic cells (rather than the muscles or fat) before being released back into the bloodstream.

In short, this liver-targeted compound could be a game-changer for how insulin works — because while the medication obviously saves lives, getting the dosing right is a huge challenge, fraught with guess-work and risks. It is well-known that injected insulin doesn’t work fast enough in the body, so Diasome’s product could be a revolutionary fix.

Having a dog may boost survival after a heart attack or stroke was reported by Maria Cohut for MedicalNewsToday.com, 9 October 2019 and by Dave Quinn for People.com, 8 October 2019.

Plenty of research has suggested that owning a dog can be beneficial to health. Two new studies now add to the existing evidence, finding an association between dog ownership and a significantly lower death risk following a stroke or heart attack.

“The findings in these two well-done studies and analyses build upon prior studies and the conclusions of the 2013 [American Heart Association] scientific statement ‘Pet Ownership and Cardiovascular Risk’ — that dog ownership is associated with reductions in factors that contribute to cardiac risk and to cardiovascular events,” says Dr. Glenn Levine, chair of the writing group that authored this scientific statement.

“Further, these two studies provide good, quality data indicating [that] dog ownership is associated with reduced cardiac and all-cause mortality,” Dr. Levine, who was not involved in this research, adds.

While these non-randomized studies cannot ‘prove’ that adopting or owning a dog directly leads to reduced mortality, these robust findings are certainly at least suggestive of this.” said Dr. Glenn Levine.

PLEASE share your pets and their stories so that we can all be healthier!!!

1 Comment

We know that small molecule insulin makes such a big difference in how quickly insulin impacts blood sugar. It makes sense to me small molecule liver oriented medications will do much for the liver side of the equation.